Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky - Part 3

Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 26

 January 26, 2017 

Book 6 - Here Comes Everybody - The Power of Organizing without Organizations
by Clay Shirky (2008)
 Part 3 - Pages 109-160

Reading Time - 50 Minutes

The star of this section is the online encyclopedia - Wikipedia. Under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, Wikipedia is almost entirely written, edited and corrected by an army of volunteers around the world. The reader who notices a spelling mistake can login and correct the error. People can add bits of new information, correct out-dated information or create entirely new articles. The key to Wikipedia is the people who use it and who care for it. There are vandals out there who try to delete things or add erroneous information, but their changes are usually undone within 2 minutes. It's a crazy system when you think about it... but it works. It is a never-ending, ongoing organic process.

But... there is an interesting dynamic that comes into play with Wikipedia, and other human endeavours. It's called the Power Law distribution curve. Bear with me... cause this is important!

Wikipedia Contributors - Power Law curve

What they noticed with Wikipedia is that you get a few people who contribute a LOT - of articles, of edits, of whatever. Most of the people might only contribute one or two things. There's an equation that you can use which basically says, your most productive contributor is a superstar, your 2nd most productive contributor contributes half as much as the first, your 3rd contributor contributes one third as much as the first... and your 10th contributor contributes one tenth as much as the first... On a graph, it looks like this... (see right). You get a few people who are responsible for the most work. It's similar to the Pareto Law - you know... 20% of people contribute 80% of whatever.

Power Law curve vs. Bell Curve

It apparently happens with employees as well... In the graph at right, they've flipped the axes but it's essentially the same as the Wikipedia contributors. A few of your employees are your star performers and make the biggest contribution. The vast majority are operating below the median...

The thing is... we still think human performance operates on a bell curve. You know... you have 16 super productive employees, 16 slackers and the rest are somewhere in the middle. Not true. The funky thing with the Power Law curve is that the Median and the Average are not the same (as on a bell curve). This means that most of your employees and most of the Wikipedia contributors are below average (gasp).

The thing with Wikipedia is this... it doesn't have to operate efficiently... if 1000s of people only make one edit, that's fine... because there are 1000s of them. It might not be efficient... but it is effective and that makes a huge difference.

On the heels of Wikipedia, Shirky also looked at how the reaction to pedophile priests in Boston differed from 1992 to 2002. In 1992, there were several news articles about priests being moved around after abusing children. The articles generated some uproar but it quickly fizzled. In 2002, however... the protests and outrage took off and generated Voice of the Faithful, the resignation of Cardinal Law and a shake-up in the Catholic Church. What was different? In 2002... people could share information very quickly via email, blogs and websites. It was also much easier to organize and find groups that were outraged. Organizing is no longer limited by geography and the laity finally have an opportunity to make their voice heard in a cohesive and coordinated way.

Social tools don't create collective action... they remove obstacles to it. It's not that people haven't wanted to organize in the past... they were stymied by time and space. Those barriers have fallen.